VENEZUELA: Mural’s Demolition Draws Mixed Reviews

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 15 2005 (IPS) - Instead of laying the cornerstone or cutting the ribbon at its inauguration, the mayor of La Guaira, Venezuela performed a rather unusual ceremonial act for the Chromatic Wall, a mural by world-renowned painter Carlos Cruz-Diez stretching two kilometres around the city’s port: he struck the first hammer blow in its demolition.

“It was an architectural aberration that hindered the relationship between the port and the community,” declared Mayor Alexis Toledo, after announcing that the wall on which the mural was painted would be replaced with a fence that would allow the people living in La Guaira – next to the capital – to see what was happening in the port.

The wall was built precisely to keep the port facilities out of sight of nearby residents. In 1991, Cruz-Diez, considered Venezuela’s most important living visual artist, painted a kinetic mural on it as a gift to the port city’s inhabitants.

But the presence of a wall around the port “made it seem more like a prison, and we wanted to integrate it with the city,” said port engineer Elías Alvarado.

“Besides, there are already so many gaps along its 2,000 metres that it can barely be called a mural,” he added.

Over the years, Cruz-Diez’s mural has been regularly defaced by graffiti, as well as being constantly plastered over with advertising posters. Several sections were also destroyed by the torrential rains and landslides that struck Venezuela’s Caribbean coast in December 1999, causing thousands of deaths and massive material damage.

“The people living on the coast wanted a view of the sea and the port,” said Francisco Zaragoza of the Department of Culture in the state of Vargas, where La Guaira is located.

In addition, Zaragoza told IPS, the artist refused to allow reforms to be made to the mural.

But Cruz-Diez, speaking from his home in Paris, where he now resides, tells a different story.

“It would have been much more economical to restore the work than to demolish the wall and build a fence. A team from my studio would have done the work, and there are a number of paint companies that would have provided the supplies needed,” he maintained. Cruz-Diez is one of the world’s foremost kinetic artists, and has created a number of architecturally integrated works, such as the ones on the floor of the Caracas international airport, the ceiling of the train station in San Quentin en Yvelines, outside Paris, and the ceiling of the Union of Swiss Banks headquarters in Zurich.

Double-sided kinetic murals by the artist can be found in the Olympic Park in Seoul, the Puerto Rico Botanical Gardens, and Oloron Sainte Marie, France.

With regard to the Chromatic Wall in La Guaira, he explained that he was asked to provide an “urban solution” for the city, “and that’s why I designed the mural.”

Its demolition, he said, “represents a policy of destroying national cultural heritage. Works by the late kinetic artists Jesús Soto and Alejandro Otero were what first introduced Venezuela into the international art world.”

Soto’s “Esfera Caracas”, a piece constructed of metal pipes alongside Caracas’ main freeway, was dismantled in 2004, presumably by scavengers. The same fate befell “Abra Solar”, a work by Otero made from 70 metres of metal sheets and formerly located in the Plaza Venezuela in downtown Caracas.

According to Cruz-Diez, works like the ones that have been lost “form part of our national artistic memory, and trying to erase them will leave the nation without memory, and a people without memory cannot evolve.”

Such arguments, however, do not pull any weight with Mayor Toledo. “We will not give in to artistic blackmail,” he stressed, noting that the wall “violates the right of the people to see the port operations.”

Moreover, he added, the parts of the wall that were spared the effects of vandalism and landslides and still show fragments of the mural will be relocated to other areas of the port.

But Cruz-Diez spoke out against this proposed solution on a local radio show, insisting that the mural “was not conceived as a work that could later be cut up into pieces. It is not a painting that you can move from one place to another. In this respect, I really do think they should take my opinion into account. If they knock it down, they should destroy it completely,” he maintained.

The Venezuelan Association of Visual Artists issued a statement in solidarity with the painter. “We are witnessing an act of ‘articide’,” the group declared. “The intellectual property law stipulates that even when a material work has been acquired by another party, the artist has the right to prohibit any modification that could threaten his or her dignity or reputation.”

Curator Luis Pérez-Oramas angrily remarked that “the history of barbarism in Venezuela will have, among many others, one everlasting and unmistakable image: that of a handful of workers raising their hammers to the mural by Cruz-Diez.”

For his part, art critic Perán Erminy said that the mural’s “ostentatious and spectacular demolition leaves no doubt as to the military’s aggression towards the arts” – a reference to the fact that the mayor of La Guaira, as well as the governor of the state of Vargas Antonio Rodríguez and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez himself, are all retired members of the armed forces.

Nevertheless, the demolition of the mural has met with support from at least some of La Guaira’s residents.

“Now we will all be able to see the port,” said Rubén Mayora, who came to watch the mayor strike the first blow to the work. Another local resident, Luis Gómez, said that the mural had robbed La Guaira of its identity as a port city.

Teacher Juan Páez told IPS that “now the warehouses and containers will be visible and people will be able to watch how the port functions. But it’s absurd to claim that they’re knocking the wall down to give them a view of the sea, because the people who live in the area live on hills, where you can already see it perfectly well.”